For Trollinger, a Lifetime With the Capitol Police Gives Unique View of D.C.

In the City of Falls Church, Jim Trollinger is an institution. To community activists, he's almost legendary, serving in a panoply of roles aimed at bettering his adopted home town, even after his beloved wife, Olga, at his side through so many community events and celebrations over the years, passed away. Jim continues to be a tireless advocate on behalf of Falls Church's youth, its open space and its smart growth. He even had an unsuccessful run at a seat on the Falls Church City Council in the mid-1990s and is on the Falls Church Democratic Committee now.

But Jim Trollinger has never forgotten the day when all the lights around the capitol building went out, during the 1968 riots in Washington, D.C.; the dome glowing like a beacon over a city in turmoil. It's a story he will occasionally tell. The picture hangs on the wall of his home in Falls Church. It is one of many events that Trollinger experienced first hand during his lifetime with the Capitol Police, protecting the country’s leaders.

Trollinger fist started with the Capitol Police on June, 1 1949, after leaving college at East Tennessee State, having exhausted all the money from his G.I. Bill grant. Looking for a job, a friend of the family recommended him to the Capitol Police and within a day he was in uniform as a member of the House Office Building detail, directing traffic on South Capitol Street.

While there were traffic lights by that time, police were still used to keep control of intersections around the Capitol. Trollinger can still remember it clearly. His sergeant, a former army officer, would step out into the street, blow his whistle and point directly at an approaching car and either tell it to stop, or wave it through, punctuating every action with his whistle.

After demonstrating for a while, he instructed Trollinger to step out into the traffic and try it on his own. “I was scared to death,” Trollinger laughed.

After three hours, the sergeant was satisfied that Trollinger understood the process, and left him there to handle everything on his own. At the time, along with automobiles, street cars would come through the intersection and Trollinger would have to stop the traffic and direct them through.

At one point, two street cars entered the intersection at the same time. Uncertain about what to do, Trollinger stood between them and attempted to wave them through, but they each refused, not moving until he got off the street and let them through one at a time. Looking back, it was an inauspicious start for a man who was later to become the deputy chief of the Capitol Police.

Fortunately, Trollinger showed enough talent directing traffic that he was moved onto other duties that included driving a public safety circuit around Capitol Hill. It was during these rounds that he first met John F. Kennedy, at that time a young representative in the House.

Trollinger had been patrolling the streets on which the representatives parked their cars when he heard a chorus of angry voices coming from the end of the line of cars. Pulling up, he discovered Kennedy surrounded by a group of men, shipbuilders, who had cornered him and were bombarding him with questions concerning job security.

Stepping out of his car and pushing between the men, Trollinger reached Kennedy. “I asked him, ‘You want to get out of here?” He said, ‘Can you do it?,” Trollinger narrated. Thinking quickly, he told the men that Kennedy had been called by the Speaker of the House to meet him directly.

Breaking through the men, he guided Kennedy to the car and drove him towards the Capitol, letting him out down the street, with the thanks of the congressman.

He didn’t hear anything from Kennedy for some time after that, and his patrols never led him to meeting again with the congressman. But months later, around Christmas, he was summoned to Kennedy’s office. Kennedy met him there and again thanked him for his assistance that day and gave him a gift of scotch.

From then on, Trollinger would meet with Kennedy every Christmas season. Even when Kennedy was unavailable he always would leave a note with his secretary and the traditional bottle of scotch.

Trollinger again came to Kennedy’s help later when he was running for president. Faced with an enormous mob calling for the congressman outside the Capitol building, Trollinger quieted the crowd and talked with his brother, Robert Kennedy, about bringing out the candidate and cordoning off an area to protect him. At the time Kennedy had lost his voice from the campaign and could barely be heard above the crowd held at bay by Trollinger and his men. After Kennedy spoke a few words, Trollinger realized that he wouldn’t be able to continue and ferried him away.

Trollinger would go on to meet many of the presidents that graced the White House during his tenure, and many of them are pictured in photos with Trollinger hung on the walls of his Falls Church house. But there isn’t a single one of Jack, as Trollinger called him. Trollinger has only one photo remembering the man he considered a friend as well as president. The picture is of Kennedy’s coffin lying in the Rotunda after his assassination in 1963

Recounting his memories of that day still brings tears to Trollinger’s eyes. After Kennedy was elected, Trollinger didn’t see him much as he traveled the country and worked from the White House. Then on November 22, Trollinger was leaving the funeral of a police sergeant when he heard on the radio that Kennedy had been shot, and a short time later the announcer confirmed that the shooting had been fatal.

Upon hearing this Trollinger immediately went home, where his family gathered around the TV waiting for more news. He arrived by 2 p.m. and despite being overwhelmed by the news, he immediately went to bed, knowing that his chief would call shortly and he would be facing a long night ahead. In two hours, the phone rang and he was told to go to headquarters. “That night there were people all over the place,” he said. “They had been gathering all day. They couldn’t find hotels. Kids were crying. There weren’t any restaurants open.”

People were waiting for the president’s body to come to Washington and as the night got longer, Trollinger realized that the crowds would need a place to stay. Eventually he opened the doors to the Russell House Office Building and let people to come in and rest on the steps, where they stayed until he had to get them out by six the next morning.

The next day as Kennedy’s body lay in repose in the rotunda, people began to form a line for viewing. As thousands gathered the line stretched out across blocks and the Capitol Police had to work along the queue to make sure that people weren’t breaking line. Throughout the day people waited patiently, some for as long as eight hours, just to see the president.

“That was a very powerful experience for me,” he said. The following years would hold many memories, though none as poignant to Trollinger. Working as part of the mechanism that made the Capitol work has given him a unique perspective on the men and women who led the nation, sometimes different than the prevailing view, other times reinforcing the general public belief.

For a short time Trollinger was a personal bodyguard to Vice President Richard Nixon, Trollinger remembers how two-faced the future president was, glad handing congressmen only to turn around and insult them behind their backs. Just as the myth of Nixon describes, he was constantly paranoid about what people were saying about him and would try to get information about others in any way possible. To his wife he was equally unpleasant, often cursing at her in front of Trollinger, not caring who overheard.

Trollinger also described Lyndon Johnson as matching the picture many have painted of him as a bully and womanizer. Despite being a lifelong Democrat, Trollinger couldn’t stand the congressman and future president when he worked on Capitol Hill. Angry and verbally abusive, Johnson would shout at everyone from cab drivers to congressmen without discrimination.

The legend of his infidelity was equally true. Trollinger remembers when he was a sergeant, and in charge of performing security checks in the House office building, because congressmen tended to be indiscreet about leaving out classified documents. Officers under his supervision would go from door to door to make sure all the offices were locked.

One of his men, upon testing Johnson’s door stumbled into the unlocked office to discover Johnson and his secretary in a compromising position.

Trollinger recalls his officer sprinting by him into the staff locker room, closely chased by Johnson. The officer hid himself in one of the lockers, successfully hiding from the enraged congressman. Johnson told Trollinger to send the man to him the next day, though Trollinger never did and Johnson didn’t press the matter.

On the other hand, Trollinger remembers President Jimmy Carter in a different way than he was perceived publicly. He remembers him as being the proverbial good soldier. Far from the pushover that he is often thought of as, Trollinger said that Carter carried himself as the commander in chief. In fact, it wasn’t until after he had left office that Trollinger was able to get Carter to sign a picture because he refused to give autographs while in office, deeming it unpresidential.

But Trollinger’s work with the Capitol Police gave him more than personal memories of former presidents. During the turbulent 1960s Trollinger would come face to face with the turmoil that was overtaking the nation.

During protests against the Vietnam War, Trollinger remembers when they had to build a fence around the Capitol to keep demonstrators from marching onto the floor and disrupting the proceedings.

As demonstrators gathered at the fence Trollinger remembers fearing that they would walk right over the barriers. But instead they just stopped and stood at the base of the fence. Then thousands of Vietnam veterans began throwing their medals over the fence at the Capitol. There wasn’t any violence; just sadness and frustration about the war.

Though Trollinger sympathized with the demonstrators, feeling too that the war had gotten out of control, he stood firm against the crowds, though he did talk to some veterans throwing medals.

“I remember one come up and stopped,” Trollinger described, choking back tears. “I said, ‘You’ve done a lot to earn this.’ He said, “This doesn’t belong to me, this belongs to my men. I can’t give it them, but I’m not going to keep it,’ and he threw it over the fence.”

After all the medals were tossed the crowd dispersed and the police proceeded to pick up and sort all the medals. They then put them in storage, awaiting anybody who would come back to claim them. After years of waiting not a single person came to claim their medals and eventually they were taken to a nearby forge and melted down.

“They just came out as a big blob,” Trollinger mused. “Nobody ever came for them.”

Another major point during that time were the riots of 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, which left the Capitol building mostly dark and destroyed whole blocks of the city.

The riots started without Trollinger realizing it. He was arranging for the acquisition of new radios and was waiting for one of his colleagues to talk about the project. The appointment was scheduled at 2 p.m. but it was hours before the man showed up. He had been forced to walk to the appointment because the riots had shut down streets.

That evening the police worked to control the rioters as much as possible. He remembers rounding up people by the truck load and taking them to prison where they would be booked as a group to expedite the process, with so many coming in. They would then go through a quick trial and be held for three days and released. Meanwhile the city continued to burn.

At the time, Trollinger and many of the Capitol Police were positioned around the Capitol to protect the building, but because of the bright spotlights focused on the building they couldn’t see anyone coming towards them.

Eventually they got in touch with the architect to get him to turn the lights off, something that had never been done since they were first installed. “They didn’t want anybody see those lights go out because that would indicate they had won,” he said.

Still, after much argument, they eventually convinced him to leave on only the lights focused on the dome. Standing by the unlit Capitol, Trollinger remembers asking one of his men to take a picture, knowing he would never see the building like that again.

Still in the city the riots continued. Looking out across the skyline, the night seemed to have turned to dawn as the fires tinted the horizon red.

The next morning at 4 a.m., as Trollinger was driving on 8th Street in Northeast D.C. surveying the damage, he came upon a series of blocks entirely burned to the ground.

“It looked like a bomb had hit it,” he said.

Moving up and down the street was a single firefighter. He had set up a series of hoses strung on fire hydrants spraying on the fires. He would adjust the stream of one hose and then move on to the next fire, covering eight blocks of fires by himself because of the overextended emergency crews.

Eventually, the city was deemed beyond the control of the local police and with the authorization of the President the Marines were sent in under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which allowed the president to call in federal troops in times of domestic turmoil. Finally, after three days of riots, order was restored. During those three days, over 1,000 buildings were destroyed and 12 people died, most as a result of the fires.

Of course not everything that Trollinger faced in the Capitol Police was as eventful as the riots. During his tenure Trollinger led the movement to organize and computerize the entire Capitol Police record system, from officers’ hours to individual background records. The project was especially difficult because he had to coordinate the efforts across both houses of congress, bodies that traditionally have been difficult to bring together administratively.

Trollinger also worked on the security for the inaugurations, helping coordinate the Kennedy inauguration and heading the process for every inauguration after that, until President Reagan’s second.

Finally when Trollinger retired in 1989, at the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term, he was greeted personally by the outgoing president and thanked for his lifetime of work.

After retiring, Trollinger has continued to work in security. He has traveled abroad as a consultant in unifying electronic security systems and has been across the globe from Europe to Africa with his recently deceased wife.

With all the events that his career took him through, and the history that has swirled around him, Trollinger has enjoyed every second of it. “Those 40 years really went by fast,” he said.